The 2026 block map, briefly
DeepSeek's rise triggered two reactions. Several governments — Italy first, then a list including Australia, Taiwan, South Korea and various US agencies — restricted it on official devices or networks, citing data-flow concerns. Separately, plenty of corporate networks and universities filter it by policy. And in the other direction, users in some regions report degraded or blocked access to DeepSeek's own endpoints. All of it is enforced the same way: DNS filtering and IP-range rules.
The three access routes
| Route | What you get | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Direct API via clean IP | Official platform.deepseek.com keys at list price | Needs a static residential IP where DeepSeek is reachable |
| Third-party hosts (Together, Fireworks, OpenRouter) | Same open-weights models from US/EU infrastructure | Slightly higher per-token price than DeepSeek direct |
| “DeepSeek mirror” chat sites | A chat box that looks like DeepSeek | Unknown operator logs everything you type — avoid |
The first two are legitimate; the third is the AI version of the torrent-mirror problem. If your prompts contain anything you wouldn't post publicly, mirror sites are not an option.
The direct setup
- Static residential IP in a country where DeepSeek is unrestricted and which matches your account region.
- Pin it in your gateway — DeepSeek's API is OpenAI-format natively, so One API / LiteLLM / plain base-URL swaps all work. Route only DeepSeek traffic through the proxy if the rest of your stack doesn't need it.
- Keep a fallback host configured. The open weights mean Together, Fireworks and OpenRouter serve the same models — if direct access degrades, your gateway fails over with a config line, not a migration.